What’s going on at Aston Martin – and how does the team find a way out of its hole?

The April edition of Autosport took a deep dive into the challenges facing Aston Martin ahead of the 2026 season: a technically daring but difficult car that arrived late in pre-season testing, and an engine partner almost starting from a clean sheet despite its recent championship-winning form.

The picture, compounded by a farcically dysfunctional official launch in Saudi Arabia, seemed desperate enough.

What’s emerged over the opening rounds of the 2026 season is that Aston Martin’s woes are even more chronic than they first appeared.

Disruption has attended this team like a Greek chorus almost since billionaire entrepreneur Lawrence Stroll bought it as a vehicle to fulfil his ambition of turning his son, Lance, into a world champion. High-profile recruitments have piled atop one another amid a flurry of management restructures.

Stroll’s high-profile recruitment of Adrian Newey as ‘managing technical partner’ was supposed to arrest that process, or at least to generate a competitive car after several seasons of midfield stagnation.

But instead the disarray has continued. Last autumn there was another bout of corporate bloodletting as CEO and team principal Andy Cowell was shifted into a nebulous liaison role with new engine partner Honda, while Newey assumed many of his functions including that of team boss.

Then, just two grand prix weekends into Newey’s reign, it was revealed that he wished to devote all his energies to resolving the 2026 car’s problems and another team principal was being recruited. Given Newey’s well-known dislike of being ‘front of house’, there were questions over how he might find the time and inclination.

It was understood the role of frontman would slide down the desk towards chief trackside officer Mike Krack, himself a former occupant of the team principal position. 

Newey describes the Honda power unit’s issue being a “self-fulfilling downward spiral”

Photo by: Lars Baron / Getty Images

With that in mind it was a surprise to arrive at Albert Park for the opening round of the season and find an Aston Martin press conference featuring Newey scheduled for first thing on Thursday morning. Newey was already down to appear in the FIA’s Friday conference, an engagement which is not optional. Why, then, was the reclusive engineer voluntarily annexing pole position on the news agenda before the weekend began? 

What eventuated was nothing short of remarkable as Newey proceeded to throw Honda under the bus while with Honda Racing Corporation president Koji Watanabe sat alongside him, staring into his iPad. An intermittent microphone connection lent the whole affair a note of farce, as if the increasingly ill-tempered Newey were channelling the spirit of the late Norman Collier (yes, we had to look it up too! – ed).

Among the eye-opening revelations was the claim that vibrations from the Honda power unit were so bad that not only were they causing the AMR26 to munch through batteries with an appetite akin to Pac-Man, the drivers were getting numb feet and hands.

“That vibration into the chassis is causing a few reliability problems. Mirrors falling off, tail lights falling off – all that sort of thing, which we are having to address” Adrian Newey

Earlier in the week, Aston’s press attaches had signalled their displeasure at a story on Autosport’s website suggesting the cars would have to be parked after a handful of laps; here Newey confirmed both his drivers were concerned they might suffer permanent nerve damage unless they quit the race early.

“That vibration into the chassis is causing a few reliability problems,” Newey said. “Mirrors falling off, tail lights falling off – all that sort of thing, which we are having to address. But the much more significant problem is that the vibration is transmitted ultimately into the driver’s fingers.

“So Fernando [Alonso] is of the feeling that he can’t do more than 25 laps consecutively before he will risk permanent nerve damage to his hands. Lance [Stroll] is of the opinion that he can’t do more than 15 laps before that threshold.

“There’s no point in not being open and honest in this meeting on our expectations. We are going to have to be very heavily restricted on how many laps we do in the race until we get on top of the source of the vibration and improve the vibration at source.”

Angling for concessions

Sources Autosport has spoken to within the paddock are firmly of the opinion that while the Honda power unit’s vibrations through the chassis produce many second-order problems, in framing it as a safety and welfare issue Newey was hoping to secure concessions to change the PU before the window of opportunity granted under the FIA’s Additional Development and Upgrade Opportunities (ADUO) framework. This is a performance balancing measure that comes freighted with restrictions.

The need “to conserve components” was cited for Alonso’s retirement in Australia

Photo by: Simon Galloway / LAT Images via Getty Images

Ordinarily the earliest a manufacturer can get permission to introduce corrective measures and secure more dyno time is the sixth race of the season. That would have been Miami but will now, following the cancellation of the Bahrain and Saudi Arabia Grands Prix, be Monaco – the first weekend in June. Not only is this very late in the season, the likelihood is that Honda will require more than the two corrective measures granted under the ADUO rubric. 

At the moment the internal combustion engine cannot run at maximum revs because of the effect of the vibrations. It’s also understood that the hybrid system is producing 50kW (equivalent to 67bhp) less than the 350kW peak enshrined in the regulations. That contributes to significantly slower lap times, because the car is calling upon the electrical system more often to compensate for the lack of horsepower from the ICU.

Newey referred to this as a “self-fulfilling downward spiral”. Autosport also understands that the engine is up to 30kg overweight.

When Honda returned to F1 as a power unit supplier with McLaren in 2015, it vastly underestimated the engineering challenges involved in the then-new regulations. In this endeavour it wasn’t helped by McLaren insisting on a ‘size zero’ aerodynamic concept, and for the 2026 PU it has been similarly constrained by Aston Martin’s push, under Newey, to package the ancillaries as tightly as possible for aerodynamic purposes.

This imposed a ‘two-deck’ battery concept as well as a different location for the energy recovery and deployment hardware.

All of this makes it harder not only to trace the source of the vibrations, but to establish whether or not elements such as the battery are part of the problem. There are similarities here with the situation in 2017, when vibrations which didn’t manifest themselves on the dyno were severe enough to rupture the oil tank once installed in the car.

“The vibrations caused damage to the battery, so we cannot say whether the battery itself is the problem,” said Ikuo Takeishi, head of HRC’s four-wheel racing department, ahead of the season. 

“You could think of it as the battery pack being shaken within the vehicle body. Essentially, the area where the battery pack is attached is vibrating. Had this been within expectations, I believe we would have made further adjustments. As it stands, I suspect we’ve encountered a rather challenging situation.

Don’t look back in anger: Stroll parked up in China after just nine laps of the race

Photo by: Sona Maleterova / Getty Images

“For instance, if the cause were pinpointed to something like the transmission or the engine, it would be much easier to tackle. However, I suspect multiple components are interacting to generate the vibration. Given that, it’s unclear whether fixing one part alone will resolve it, so we can’t rule out the possibility of this dragging on. That said, purely in terms of determination, I’m absolutely intent on fixing it quickly.”

Honda has installed an engine within an AMR26 monocoque at its Sakura R&D headquarters in its quest to trace the source of the vibrations, but in the short term all it can do is mitigate the problem by trying to isolate the energy store. By race day in Australia Aston Martin only had two batteries left, limiting its running given that it would be unable to obtain more ahead of the following weekend’s event in China.

HONDA UNDER PRESSURE

At Albert Park, Alonso made a great start to briefly run 10th from 17th on the grid before slipping back, but then pitted after 15 laps so the team could “make some adjustments”. After an 11-lap hiatus Alonso rejoined the race, completed a handful more laps, then retired “to conserve components”. Stroll also paid an extended visit to the garage, completed 43 of the 58 laps, and was officially a DNF despite taking the chequered flag. 

In China, both drivers completed the sprint race, having qualified over two seconds off the pace, and Stroll retired from the grand prix after nine laps with “a suspected battery issue”. Alonso made it to 32 laps before stopping “due to discomfort from vibrations”. Quite how discomfited was revealed later, when onboard shots emerged showing Alonso having to take his hands off the steering wheel and flex his fingers.

“I could not probably finish the race anyway,” he said. “Vibration levels were very high today. At one point, from lap 20 to 35, I was struggling a little bit to feel my hands and my feet. We were one lap behind, we were last. It was probably no point to keep on going. 

Every track session now heaps pressure on Honda, so the timing of its home race being the third round of the season was highly sub-optimal

“It was worse today than any other session in the weekend, to be honest. For whatever reason, I don’t know. Some of the steps we did were achieved artificially – just lowering the RPM of the engine and things like that, so everything vibrates less. But in the race, obviously, you still need to go high in some of the RPM when you make an overtake move, or when you have to recharge or something like that. Over time, it’s more difficult. It’s more demanding.”

Every track session now heaps pressure on Honda, so the timing of its home race being the third round of the season was highly sub-optimal, though at least Alonso finished the GP. Aston Martin needs to tread a delicate diplomatic path between pushing its engine partner to do better and dynamiting the relationship entirely, as McLaren did in 2017.

That partnership fractured because neither side would recognise its shortcomings, and there are signs that Aston Martin is beginning to make the same mistakes. In the FIA conference in Australia, Newey claimed that his senior management didn’t know until last November that the majority of engineers who had worked on Max Verstappen’s championship-winning power units had been dispersed within the company. That is a remarkable assertion to be making in public.

Takeishi and Watanabe keep the mood upbeat on arrival in the Melbourne paddock

Photo by: Lars Baron / Getty Images

Newey has said Aston Martin has the capacity at the moment to be F1’s “fifth-best team” in terms of car performance, suggesting he sees its natural level as just behind Mercedes, Ferrari, McLaren and Red Bull. The AMR26 is certainly a daring and extreme piece of design, but whether it’s actually quick is yet to be established via the stopwatch.

“The car has huge, tremendous development potential in it,” said Newey. “It will take, of course, a few races for us to fully realise that potential. I see no inherent reason within the architecture of the car why we can’t become, on the chassis side, close to if not fully competitive.”

Much now hangs on whether the lobbying for engine-development concessions is successful. And these are decisions that will be made at a level well above the team principal’s pay grade…

What are additional development and upgrade opportunities? 

Although the new power units are homologated to prevent an expensive development race, the FIA has introduced a framework that enables underperforming manufacturers to catch up. But even this is laden with restrictions to prevent performance enhancements being smuggled through under the pretence of fixing reliability issues.

The Additional Development and Upgrade Opportunities (ADUO) rules essentially offer three ‘windows’ through the season where the FIA permits changes to be made, having monitored engine performance throughout the season. These coincide with races six, 12 and 18.

Manufacturers judged to be between 2% and 4% down on power will be permitted limited upgrades and more hours on the dyno; those over 4% off will have greater scope for change. There is also some leniency in terms of spending under the budget cap.

This article is one of many in the monthly Autosport magazine. For more premium content, take a look at the May 2026 issue and subscribe today. 

Alonso admits to struggling to feel his hands and feet due to vibrations

Photo by: Paul Crock / AFP via Getty Images